Infiniti's real-life Vision GT concept bows in China

A digital fantasy enters the meatspace as Infiniti builds a real version of its Gran Turismo 6 concept car and shows it off in Shanghai.

Concept cars, of late, have fallen into two camps, the first being nearly final production designs wearing some extra bling. Others are entirely impractical exercises in pure design, bearing little relation to anything you'd see on the road. And then, there's this gorgeous thing from Infiniti—an honest-to-goodness concept car in the original sense of the world. It's mostly a design exercise but it's not so unhinged from reality that it couldn't be turned into a driver.

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That's neat, especially because this car—the Infiniti Vision GT—was designed as part of the digital-only fantasyland that is the Vision Gran Turismo project. Most of those won't cross over from pixels to 1:1 real world models, with a few exceptions. After all, Chevrolet built the Chaparral 2X Vision Gran Turismo in meatspace, but that one's otherwise as fictional as they come. It'll never drive, at least not with its phantasmagorical laser drivetrain.

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Meanwhile, the Infiniti Vision GT was physically present in Shanghai at the Infiniti Design Night, giving a tangible peek at how a future Infiniti flagship GT might look, grounded in some semblance of how real-world cars work.

In the virtual world, the Vision GT is powered by a naturally-aspirated V8 that sends power to the rear through a transaxle. That's certainly plausible: Infiniti (nee Nissan) V8s are already on the shelf, and the GT-R uses a rear transaxle. It's truly fantasy grounded in reality, just the way we like our concept cars. The Shanghai physical concept, though, is likely just a roller.

Why Shanghai? Well, the car was designed there, at the Infiniti Design Center in Beijing, which just opened late last year. Their Vision GT car won an international competition against the company's other design proposals. Watch more on the Infiniti Vision GT below: